Character escaping in CAML query (REST call)

Question

I use JS to create a CAML query. When it is generated, it looks like this:

@v1 = {"ViewXml":"<View Scope='RecursiveAll'><ViewFields><FieldRef Name='ID'/><FieldRef Name='Title'/><FieldRef
 Name='Designation'/><FieldRef Name='srd_title2'/></ViewFields><Query><Where><Contains><FieldRef Name
='Subject'/>My Value Here<Value Type='Note'>

When users attempt to search using values such as "My Hand\Number2" or "Body & Styles", I receive errors such as "An unrecognized escape sequence '\' was found in a JSON string value". I changed the code to do a manual replacement (e.g., param.replace("\\","\\\\"), and that worked for back slashes. But is there a good way to make sure I'm checking for all of these? I tried using CDATA such as in this example: https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/a/11703/24039 to no avail.

update: I actually used val.(/\\/g, "\\\\") as Wrapping "val" in encodeURI or encodeURIComponent is not working for this case. I didn't realize the double \ became escaped when I submitted the question, so I wrapped it in a code block now. Sorry for the confusion.

Answer 1

I recommend using the build-in JS functions of SharePoint to work with these kind of errors. Try using escapeProperly()

Here is a page that lists some of those functions: https://praneethmoka.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/some-useful-javascript-variablesfunctions-in-sharepoint/

Answer 2

Usually in SharePoint 2013 REST special characters are escaped using HTML encoding in query string. If you are using JavaScript try using encodeURIComponent method to format your CAML query variable value.

More about it: http://www.sharepointyammertech.com/2014/12/sharepoint-2013-how-to-handle-special.html